Tokyo's Last Vampire: Division 12: The Berkhano Vampire Collection
Page 1
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Rift
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5: Thirty-two Years Before
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Tokyo’s Last Vampire
By Tiffany Wayne
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Tokyo’s Last Vampire
Copyright © by Tiffany Wayne
All rights reserved
No part of this text may be used or reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in review, without written permission from the author.
Cover Design by Rebecca Frank
ISBN: 978-0-473-43243-0
First Edition
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Rift
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5: Thirty-two Years Before
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: The Rift
My name is Valaria Valentin, and I am one of the few beings left on God’s Island who remembers the day it ended, the day everything came crashing down. Or perhaps I should say, the day it all began. I guess it depends on how you look at things. Personally, I’ve never been a glass is half-full kind of girl and these are hard times. I am the last vampire in Division 12, and things around town have been getting rather…interesting as of late. But I’ll get to that later. Let me first tell you about how all this got started.
The people of Japan called it the Rift or the breaking of the world—the event that happened fifty years ago. Every big, world-ending cataclysm needs a fancy sounding, not particularly scary name after all. Landmasses split. Some sank into the sea while others rose. The world went from having hundreds of nations to having sixteen divisions walled off from each other by impenetrable dome-like barriers. What was left of Japan became known as Division 12. Twelve was my favorite number as a kid, but it isn’t anymore.
I was eight years old and toured downtown Tokyo with my parents when the Rift hit. My mother had a guest lecturer position in economics at the University of Tokyo, and that weekend was our first touring of the city since our arrival. The weather was beautiful—crisp, cool and perfect for walking. The sakura trees were in full bloom turning Tokyo and its surroundings into a pink, cotton-candy wonderland.
We’d planned to visit all the best hot spots—the Skytree tower with its expansive views of the city, the Imperial Palace, the indoor arcade at Joypolis (to please my gaming-obsessed brother), and the science exhibits at Miraikan. Tokyo Disneyland was on the agenda for the following day. My brother and I couldn’t wait for Disney. We’d heard Mickey and Minnie wore kimonos. For some reason, the idea delighted us. We wanted photographic evidence to send back to our friends in the States.
Our last day as a family was damned near perfect except for all the locals wanting to take pictures with us. You’d think they hadn’t seen people with red hair before. It was as if we were minor celebrities, which threw me for a loop. Back home I’d grown accustomed to a certain amount of invisibility at school and home.
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The Rift began with a massive earthquake. I’d never been in an earthquake and imagined the earth only shook, the way our old house in Georgia sometimes did when my brother thundered down the hallway. But no, the earth did far more than shake. It jumped. It threw every member of my family in the air. I’m sure we looked like basketballs, only we didn’t bounce when we landed.
We were fortunate to be in Hamarikyu Gardens when the quake hit. At least there, the ground was soft, and there weren’t any skyscrapers to collapse and crush us. The storm came next with crashing thunder and pelting rain. The earth continued to shake, whether from aftershocks or thunder we couldn’t tell. Everything was bedlam as my father pulled us all into a tight, protective huddle. The quake brought down the power grids so when the sky turned black, so did the city. Day turned to night in only minutes, except for an occasional bolt of lightning streaking the sky. Boom. Crash. Sizzle. People cried. People screamed. My brother and I whimpered.
At some point, our parents grabbed us up and started to run, using the light from their cell phones to navigate. Around us was chaos. Complete and utter, loud, smoky, wet, scare-you-to-your-core chaos. “Get to higher ground,” yelled my dad. Was he worrying about a tsunami?
He was right to be concerned. The roaring wall of water was soon to come. I don’t know where they thought we could go, but my parents ran and ran and then ran some more. I remember the raggedness of their breathing. It was so dark I couldn’t see their faces, with only the light of their phones pointing away to help guide our progress. I couldn’t see how scared they were. But I could hear it. Those sounds are the last memories I have of my family before the wave swept us away from each other and swirled me into the arms of something new. Something far less…normal.
When I regained consciousness, I found myself under an assortment of debris, slumped against a traditional Japanese tiled roof, the house beneath it collapsed. The blackness of the sky was gone as was much of the water. A smoky twilight loomed over a broken Tokyo. The concrete and glass garden I’d marveled at only hours before lay in ruins.
As I stared out upon the disaster, I was numb. There were no tears to be had. No panic. I was empty. I didn’t know where my parents where. I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know the Japanese language beyond konichiwa, sayonara, and domo arigato. The world had ended, and I was in Japan…of all places. Few locations would have left me farther from home. Why the world couldn’t have been polite enough to end when I was at home in Georgia, I didn’t know. I was truly a stranger in a strange land.
I didn’t shift from my position on the roof for hours. My mom had drilled into me that if I were ever lost, I was to stay right where I was. And boy was I lost. At first, I prayed to God that this apocalypse was all a bad dream. Then I prayed for my parents and brother to find me. After not seeing another living creature for three hours, I prayed I wasn’t the last human on Earth. I’d just started praying for my own death when they appeared.
A witch and a vampire.
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br /> Of course, I didn’t know they were a witch and vampire right then. They appeared normal, albeit a little too good-looking and put together to be out for a stroll during the end times.
Hana and Juro walked hand-in-hand as any couple in love. And at the time, they were. I’m not saying eyelashes were being batted and kisses being had—this was the apocalypse after all—but they were clearly there for each other. Hana was bereft as she called out to the emptiness. “Is anyone there? Hello? Hello?”
Some would think that after sitting alone for hours and wondering if I was the last person on Earth, that the normal reaction might be to jump up and make my presence known when two people arrived, but I didn’t. They spoke in Japanese and appeared foreign in more ways than most. It wasn’t that they were Asian. I had Asian friends in the States. What first struck me was their attire. I was a kid who’d grown up in a white, middle-class, American burb-clave. I didn’t know people like Hana and Juro who had piercings and tats. Hana’s hair was fluorescent blue for God’s sake. These were clearly cool, hip, twenty-somethings, and I was neither cool nor hip. Despite the current apocalypse, I was very aware of not wanting to overstep my position in the social hierarchy. I was mid-tier all the way, neither cool nor uncool. They might laugh at me if I approached.
I was a statue as they neared and thought I was in the clear when they walked past me. Then Juro’s head jerked back, his nose twitching as if searching the air for a scent.
His eyes landed on me, narrowed and predatory.
I sucked in a breath and was moments from fleeing as fast as my little girl feet could carry me when Juro’s eyes calmed, and a wide smile overtook his face.
Hana thwacked him on the arm. “You scared the poor kid,” she said, racing over to where I sat. She immediately engulfed me in a hug. “We were beginning to think we were the last ones left alive.”
At the time, all of this was said in Japanese, so I didn’t understand a word. It was only because of Juro’s retellings that I learned what had been said. Juro loved a good yarn, and few were better than how our strange little family of a vampire, a witch and an eight-year girl from Georgia came to be. Maybe the only one better would be how I came to be a vampire and how our little family fell apart.
Chapter 2
That was how the world I lived in began, fifty long years ago. Pretty nifty, right?
Now at fifty-eight years old, I didn’t know of anyone, not even the witches on Mount Fuji, who were as old as me. Not that I appeared old. There were few perks of vampirism, but always looking good was one of them. I’d been turned at eighteen so as long as I avoided a stake through the heart or having my head lopped off, I would forever portray the part of a youthful teenager.
Only my two closest friends in Tokyo knew I was a vampire, and they weren’t telling a soul. Most of Tokyo had forgotten vampires existed. It’d been thirty years since the great purge when the witches and Yakuza joined forces to eradicate what they called the oni, a.k.a. vampires. It was the vampires who were ultimately blamed for the Rift, you see. Rumor had it that a vampire tricked a witch into trying to break the vampire curse, and the resulting spell warped the magical fabric of existence. The Rift was the price we all paid for that folly. With life expectancy hovering at forty years old, most of those who fought in the purge were long since buried and with them the city’s fear of blood-seekers.
After Juro’s death six months ago, I moved to Tokyo, upping the vampire population of the city from zero to one. In addition to being the city’s only vampire, I was the only redhead and the only American. Woot. Woot. A trifecta of an oddity for the win. Before the vampire purge, there had also been a cleansing of foreigners. It was years before people learned what had caused the Rift, and during that time they needed someone to blame for their misery. I survived both genocides only because Juro, Hana and I lived in a remote village far from the chaos.
I now worked at the Tokyo Metropolitan Library and also called it home along with the two human friends I mentioned—Midori and her fourteen-year-old son, Kol. Midori and Kol handled everyday library business. Information was gold in those trying times as was any form of escapist entertainment. I had a sideline business in acquisitions that I ran through them. As with any society, there were two sides: the haves and the have-nots. The haves wanted all the pretty, shiny things, and I helped find them the best baubles. When the quake hit, most of Japan’s nuclear power plants melted down. Over half the island was toast including a large swath of greater Tokyo. Humans entering the fallout zones became sick and died. The radiation made me sick as well, but I healed quickly and took several trips into the zone each week for plunder.
Midori’s parents, the Takeyuchis, had been friends with Juro and Hana before the Rift and knew he was a vampire. Juro had mentioned them on occasion, and in a letter I found after his death, he’d suggested I seek out the family. Midori’s parents had died of the flu a decade before I showed up on the library doorstep. Fortunately, they left a very well-read daughter who was a fan of Anne Rice and Stephenie Meyer. As a result, Midori was ecstatic to meet a real, live vampire although that excitement waned when she learned I didn’t sparkle. I believed she was also disappointed I wasn’t a guy who could offer her epic romance. After losing Juro, I never thought I’d feel anything but alone in this world, but I quickly came to see Midori and Kol as my new family. I loved them as if they were my own children.
********
Returning home to Midori and Kol one night after a very fruitful expedition into the radiation zone, I sang an oldie from the before—Radioactive by Imagine Dragon.
It seemed apropos, and my body warmed with happiness. In addition to silverware and jewelry that would keep us eating for at least a month, I’d found three old photo albums. They weren’t the boring kind with pictures of babies and fluffy kittens. Whomever they’d belonged to had been world travelers and were kind enough to label all their memories with details of dates and locations. The taglines were in French. I couldn’t read the language, but it served no problem for Midori, a polyglot of the highest order. Some of the places in the photos I recognized as Moscow, New York, and London. Others would be a surprise once Midori was able to translate. Midori and Kol loved to hear about my life in America, and although the library had some travel books, new images were always welcome. In addition to the photo albums, I’d also found an old Polaroid camera and some film, and I couldn’t wait to put it to good use.
Nearing the library, I passed a group of men loitering outside a gaming den. I lowered my hood and sped up. Unfortunately, one of the men decided to show off his manly prowess. “Hey there, sweet thing. I’ll pay to play,” said the buffoon, grabbing my arm. Except for Kol and Juro before him, I didn’t especially enjoy those carrying the Y chromosome. Too many lacked any sort of manners. Juro had trained me in multiple martial arts including karate, aikido, and jujutsu. That training came in handy more often than I would have thought. I side-stepped the man and grabbed his wrist as he lurched forward off balance. I yanked the guy’s arm up behind him, sending him to his knees with an arm bar.
“Do you know what the number one rule with women is?” I asked.
He shook his head, face growing red.
“You ask before touching. Got it?”
“Got it.”
I released him, and he slunk back to his group. They called him kid names and howled at seeing their friend being bested by a woman.
“Thank you, Juro,” I whispered, glancing at the heavens and wishing more women knew how to stand up for themselves. The Rift had set the women’s liberation movement back to zero for those not magically gifted, and cavemen reigned over the city. Hello, Dark ages.
Five minutes later I skipped up the steps of the library, already taking the albums out of my bag to show Midori. I dropped them upon entering at the sound of a scream.
Kol flew across the room and slammed into a wall. His small form crumpled to the ground unconscious. I spotted three men dressed in robes, but no Midori
.
In two bounds, I was across the room with my hands almost around the neck of the man who’d thrown Kol. Rage steamrolled my entire body, overtaking the Zen calm I liked to maintain. And with that rage came thirst. Walking the streets at night, I often had to defend myself. Men were pigs. But my encounters had always been quick and emotionless. I’d never felt angry. Only annoyed. I had fought like a human, albeit a skilled one and employed no more strength than a human would. By doing so, I’d kept my thirst in check. Not only did I need to hide what I was from the masses, but my thirst, which gave me inhuman strength, also gave me blinders. It became difficult to see through my bloodlust, making me stupid, which was why I didn’t see the danger until Midori shouted, “V, look out.”
My eyes landed on Midori just as I was thrown backwards without being touched. A woman in a green cloak held Midori while another in red glared at me, arm outstretched. A witch had come down off the Mount. “Why are you here?” I snarled, fighting to rein in my hunger so as not to appear inhuman.
“Run her through,” said the witch with a dismissive flick of her fingers.
I’d barely taken in her words when a sword appeared in my gut, pinning me to the wall. I stared down at my own blood gushing from the wound, trying to hold it in with my hands, to no avail.
Hopelessly, I reached for Midori as the red witch pulled her from the room. “No,” I screamed. “No. No. No.”
I fought to pull the sword from my stomach but couldn’t, my strength draining with my blood.
Red.
So much red.
With Midori gone, it was all I could see.
I was bleeding out and desiccating. My hunger grew rapacious as I battled to remain conscious.
Since my hands were covered in the blood I needed, I sucked on my fingers, lapping at the life force I was losing like some sick, demonic oni. At that moment, I understood the necessity of the vampire purge. My own need repulsed me, but still, I slurped my own blood.